Daily briefing Sunday 28th December

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0:35This is the Times news briefing for Sunday, the 28th of December. Ukraine's president is preparing for crucial talks with Donald Trump to once again try to bring the nearly four-year-old war to an end. Vladimir Zelensky told reporters a sustained drone and missile attack on Kyiv yesterday shows the Kremlin isn't interested in stopping the fighting. But Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, visiting a forces command center, said it was Ukraine who won't end it. Unfortunately, the ringleaders of the Kiev regime are in no hurry to solve this conflict peacefully. If they don't want to solve it in a peaceful way, we'll reach all of our goals by military means.

1:13Today's meeting will focus on territorial concessions in the contested Donbass region. A former advisor to Ukraine's defense minister, Yuri Sakh, told Times Radio security guarantees will also be central. One thing that needs to be accomplished by the parties involved in this peace process is to ensure that Russia doesn't reinvade sometime down the line. So security guarantees will be a focal point. And this will be one of the key points of discussion, both the security guarantees that Ukraine aspires to achieve from the United States of America, as well as from our European partners. It's emerged that Sir Keir Starmer nominated a former advisor for a peerage, despite knowing he campaigned for a councillor who'd been charged with child sex offences.

1:56Matthew Doyle, the former Downing Street communications head, was nominated after an investigation into his continued support for a former Labour councillor charged with possessing and distributing indecent images of children. The Sunday Times' Whitehall editor, Gabriel Pogrand, wrote the story. What I've established is not only the detail of his connections with this sex offender, but also the extent to which Number 10 was warned about this association. But I think there are some questions as to what Number 10 knew and ultimately what decision-making process to start and follow. Because he was kept abreast of this at all points, I'm told.

2:32Members of the group that brought the Supreme Court case over sex-based rights say the UK and Scottish governments are stalling on implementing the court's ruling. It found that under equalities law, the term woman refers to biological sex. through founders of Four Women Scotland who have told the Sunday Times that ministers are trying to thwart it by delaying guidance for public bodies. And an actress who wants to ban smartphones for under-16s is backing the Sunday Times' Get Britain Reading campaign. Sophie Winkleman says the push, which aims to get people reading for 10 minutes a day, is welcome because phones and tablets often win against books.

3:07It's a totally brilliant campaign and I think it's really sad that even good readers as children, children who used to love reading, once machines come into their lives they just stop reading. It's part of the reason I'm fighting screens in schools because once you get rid of textbooks and you get rid of set texts, books are deliberately being antiquated so that they're just rarer than unicorns in children's lives. You can follow The Times News Briefing on Spotify and listen live to Times Radio Online.

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